I hear a lot of people complain about how cell phones and Facebook are taking over our lives, creating the expectation that we should always be available. But is that true? I think that hinges on whether or not these things force us to do anything. Since they don’t, I think we might need to reexamine the problem.

People might feel pressure to check their email every five minutes, but that pressure is internal, not external. Before the internet, people felt pressured to stay near a telephone. Before that, they eagerly awaited the mail courier or religiously went to gathering places to stay in the social loop. The pressure isn’t new.

To show how the pressure to always be on call is actually something of an irrational social anxiety that comes from within, consider this: when is the last time you got mad at somebody for not responding to your email or Facebook message within five minutes, or got angry because your call went to voicemail instead of being answered immediately? Thankfully, that kind of entitlement mentality is rare, or else we wouldn’t be able to turn off our mobile devices at the theater, which most people manage to do without a problem. You probably haven’t decided to shun anybody for those things, so you shouldn’t worry about the world conspiring to shun you.

In short, the problem is our own insecurity, not the technology.

Another interesting complaint that Kate mentioned in her post that got my attention as a user experience designer was her statement that “The profound satisfaction of getting to know a machine is something that disappears with ease-of-use.”

Her opinion reminds me of the one held by a lot of Gentoo Linux developers. They resisted making the installation process easier for a long time because they wanted people to learn all about their system, which they felt the difficult manual command-line interface installation would make people experts in. And I suppose that it’s a good sign that a computer scientist or a programmer feels that way since in a way, that shows that they really love what they do.

However, as a user experience designer, I’m interested in a different sort of profound satisfaction. My field is all about making technology and information more accessible. I enjoy tinkering with Gentoo Linux and other “advanced computer geek things,” but if everybody that made them felt the way that Kate and the Gentoo developers felt, then a lot of people wouldn’t be able to use technology.

It might be fun for some of us, but computers weren’t invented so that people could sit there and figure out how they work or how to use them. They exist to enable us to do things, and the harder a computer is to use, the more of an obstacle it is to accomplishing things with them. I don’t fear complexity, but I do think that unnecessary difficulty is undesirable.

Graphical user interfaces, mouse and keyboard interfaces, and sites like Wikipedia all come together to make it easy for everybody to access all of human knowledge, not just an elite group of users. I think that’s wonderful, and that kind of thing is why I hope to be a part of helping even more people take advantage of all the things that computers, the internet, and the rest of modern technology enables.

And rest assured, plenty of people will still be interested in the computers themselves. I sure am.

Some resources I used when making my decisions are SmartVoter.org, DailyKOS, and the Union Tribune.

I’m a nonpartisan, so I got to choose what ballet I wanted. I selected a Democratic ballet. If you have a different ballet, then we’ll still at least have the propositions in common, so I’ll start with those.

Today, I had my last English Composition: Creative Persuasion & Argument class. I turned in my final paper, and also did an optional presentation that was pretty funny.

The paper, “Thou Shalt Not Impose,” is a proposal argument about how religion has intruded into our government, why it’s a problem, and what specifically we should do.

Don’t forget that you can change the text-viewing options at the top of the page to make it easier to read.

The visual argument (teensy-weensy PDF) I presented is the same topic, but with my sense of humor poured all over it. Parts of it might not make sense without knowing what I was saying while I was presenting (you can probably figure it out if you read the paper), but that’s alright since I’m uploading it because it makes me laugh. I had fun with it.

Well, I’m happy that Flash isn’t going to be such a crutch anymore. If a concept for a site can be executed with HTML instead of Flash, it should be built in HTML about 99% of the time.

Right now though, a lot of developers don’t do that though because they like making things in Flash more than they like coding with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and so on. To them, the important thing is the final product, and if they think it’s easier or more enjoyable to do it in Flash, and if Flash is perceived as an acceptable standard on the web, then that’s what they’ll use.

But now that their sites flat-out fail on the iPhone, they’ll be forced to build in HTML again. Frustrating for a lot of developers, but in the long run, it benefits consumers since they’ll get faster-loading, less buggy web sites. In the short run, it frustrates consumers too, but there hasn’t been much of a revolt since Flash web designers have always been supposed to at least build really simple non-Flash versions of their sites.

The trouble is that there’s a lot more than just web sites on the web, so while I’m happy to see this put the upcoming HTML5 into such a great position, HTML5 is just for building web sites while Flash isn’t. All the other things that Flash can do—programs, games, interactive animations, and so forth—aren’t really answered for by HTML5 because that’s not what it’s for. Sure, programmers can build programs and games for the iPhone, but what a hassle for all the people who learned to be Flash developers. It’s easier to make programs and games in Flash, and when completed, they’d work on any device that had a Flash plugin without any more work. I don’t consider myself a Flash designer, but I do feel a little sorry for my friends who are.

I can’t help but think that the biggest winners are people with phones running Android, WebOS, and other alternatives to the iPhone. They get to have their cake and eat it too. They’ll enjoy all the benefits of a web that’s built more on HTML5, and if Adobe’s latest press releases about plug-ins coming soon for them are to be believed, they’ll also get to keep enjoying all the cool things that will only ever be made in Flash. In other words, they get to eat the fruits of Apple’s labor while still being pampered by Adobe. And so to them, I say enjoy it.

Display in browser – You can change the text-viewing options at the top of the page to make it easier to read.
Download PDF – Formatted oh-so-nicely in Adobe InDesign because I had some extra time.

There’s a lot of meat in this one, and every bit of it is honest. It contains:

1. The way I think and why I’m an atheist.
2. How we’re treated by others (and how I used to think of atheists too).
3. The questions that got me started on the road to atheism.
4. Meeting with my old priest about those questions.
5. What it felt like to go from proud Catholic to ashamed doubter to unashamed atheist.
6. Telling my mom.
7. How different friends reacted.
8. What I hope to prove to others.

I tried to make “Good Atheists” as interesting and insightful as possible, especially for people who aren’t atheists. Let me know your thoughts.

You can download the session review (PDF). I also went and compiled all of the released materials I’ve made so far into one nicely organized, bookmarked file (also PDF).

Also, as a little web-only goody, you can see the character sheets of the enemy hero party that was tracked down and murdered during the prequel. They’re just regular HTML, so they’ll load in your browser like normal web sites.

1. Gargash the Barbarian
2. Telon the Rogue
3. Elaine the Sorceress

You may now resume your regularly scheduled Friday nights—for now!

——

Instructions: Find two or more quotes by other people that together say something that you’d have a hard time saying yourself. Post them with these instructions and just leave it at that. Plain text is good, and if you link to images from sites like and-i-quote.tumblr.com and postsecret.blogspot.com then you should probably also post the plain text and the url.

1. From http://mackyyy.tumblr.com/post/399430272

“Everyday,
I fight back the urge to text you or call you,
teling myself that
if you wanted to talk to me,
you would.”

2. From http://babblecrossing.tumblr.com/post/392767283/rainingdogsandfish-inspyrred-ichliebe

funny how sometimes
you’re missing somebody,
but when that somebody shows up.
you do NOTHING.

And if you want to learn more about the world and the main campaign’s story, then here is a round-up of all the little things I’ve made so far. They’re all PDFs.

• Main Story Handout
• Bio: Holy King Remwald the Jubilant
• World Map

Please feel free to leave a comment to encourage/terrify the players, but remember that I will be watching for anything that even remotely seems like unfair help.

One of AAU’s 32 bajillion buildings. They’re basically a real estate mafia at this point.

I had a nice, long break. I nearly did everything on my winter break bucket list, although I had to replace “go to a water park” with something else because apparently San Diego suddenly thinks it experiences winter (it doesn’t). The only unchecked item was going to the park on a sunny day to see how many cherry pits could fit in my mouth. I guess I’ll just have to find time to do that very important thing.

Also, I’m happy because I got a perfect A in the class I took during the intercession, Art History through the 19th Century. My transcript hasn’t been updated yet, but I think my cumulative GPA is now above 3.8, which should put me on the President’s Honor List. It’d be easier to stay on there if A-’s didn’t push you off. I wish my school would weight A-’s the same as A’s. Oh well. Right now I’m on the list, and I’d proud of everything I accomplished even if I wasn’t.

As for this upcoming semester, I finally heard back from the swim team. It’s a deal. I’m on it. I’m sure it’ll be a while before I’m able to keep up with them, but the person I talked to said it would be okay. I’m also going to be taking advantage of the Body Sculpting and Yoga classes my school has started to offer. If I can stick to all of that, then I should be able to partially compensate for all the chocolate I eat whenever I come home.

Oh, and for anybody following the D&D campaign I’m running, you can check out the map (PDF) I made. I tried to make all the names of places fun to say out loud, so have fun.

And now, time to board. See ya.

They all seem really excited, which in turn makes me really excited. After we met for the first time last Friday to go over the basic rules and start building character sheets, I knew I wanted to really give them the deluxe storytelling experience.

If anybody wants to follow along, you can check out the campaign premise (PDF) and read up on the character King Remwald (also PDF, read this one second). Also, you might get a kick out of an old post I wrote about the different types of D&D players.

If you are a player in this campaign, then don’t worry, you don’t need to make fancy PDFs when you write your character’s backstory or anything like that. If you feel inspired, then go for it, but just have fun and leave the work to me.

If you aren’t a player in this campaign, then feel free to leave comments, but know that we’ll ignore you if you try to do any backseat driving, and I’ll delete those comments when I see them. No, you don’t get to be “a voice in their character’s head.” I’m posting this stuff because I realized players from my previous campaigns as well as friends of the current players might be interested, not because I want the internet to swoop in and do the thinking for my players. So please don’t spoil anything by posting your theories, non-mechanics advice, puzzle solution ideas, etc. If I feel like we have a problem, then I just won’t post campaign materials publicly. We’ll see how this goes.

Good luck, players!